White participants’ brains assumed black people did not feel pain

Evidence

In a study conducted at the University of Milano–Bicocca, researchers measured the biophysical responses of white participants to a video showing skin touched by a needle or an eraser. Ordinarily when we see someone in pain, it triggers a reaction in the same area of the brain where we experience our own pain. But white participants reacted differently to white people in pain than they did to black people. This was not a matter of disregarding the pain of black people but an assumption that the pain wasn’t even felt by black people. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s notes on silencing/othering mechanisms in One Square Inch of Silence and to Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on black pain being discounted; also the classic Hoffman study finding on racial empathy gaps in pain perception.
• DEFINE: Helps pin down Glaude’s definition of racial habits empirically: an automatic neural response, not a belief or prejudice.